Humans from a Cultural and Sexual Perspective.

"It is good to see the dove having to live in prison. Our happiness and joy should not come from the pain and suffering of others" [27; p. 16].

In Ma Van Khang's concept, beauty is first and foremost goodness, goodness is the source of all beauty. This concept is completely different from Nguyen Tuan's. In Echoes of a Time , Nguyen Tuan passionately praised an executioner, because he had a very sweet way of cutting. He looked at people purely from an aesthetic perspective, not from a moral perspective. The beauty in Nguyen Tuan's pen is often the "evil flowers". Ma Van Khang seeks beauty in ordinary people, in simple, innocent lives, reflecting people from a traditional perspective. In the space of the mountains and forests, Pao ( San Cha Chai ) lives with great love, great loyalty, honesty, simplicity, and kindness. The beauty in that good soul is moving, growing up gradually to become useful. After five years of perseverance and persistence with responsibility, Pao has passed the age of twenty, but he has truly grown up, truly become useful to life. The concept of goodness as beauty is especially expressed by Ma Van Khang in the story Giang Ta, the wanderer . Giang Ta is beautiful, the beauty of physique, healthy and always doing good deeds. The goodness is inherent in that physically beautiful person. Placed in the relationship with Liphige, the commando, the village captain, the goodness in Giang Ta becomes even more prominent. The character of Giang Ta is the writer's dialogue on the issue of good and bad. Giang Ta is innocently good like his primitive and ignorant instinct. He helps the enemy without knowing that he is helping the enemy, living innocently and foolishly. It is this innocent kindness that harms Giang Ta.

Thus, with a grateful view of humanity, Ma Van Khang discovered the beauty in ordinary people in mundane life. It is not only heroes and great men who have culturally imbued behaviors, it is not only great people who have good souls. The beauty and goodness are hidden.

in ordinary people. In an interview, Ma Van Khang once confided: "The urge for me to write is the beauty of life" [34]. Is that why most of the characters in his short stories are the embodiment of beauty, living and behaving according to the call of truth, goodness, and beauty. Ma Van Khang's literature carries eternal beauty as in Tschenusepxki's view: "Beauty is life, a beautiful being is through which we see life or makes us think of life" [8; p. 48].

1.2.1.2. The bad and the evil.

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Not only passionately praising the beauty and goodness of people, Ma Van Khang, with his insightful vision, also discovered the ugliness and evil that exist right in this world. He was heartbroken and aching before a world where humanity was fading, where jealousy, envy, treachery, ingratitude, and betrayal took over, taking their place, forming a perfect pair with beauty and goodness. Mrs. Nhan ( Midland Afternoon Rain ) was born into a working class family, uneducated, living in exile, and fortunately thanks to her beauty, she was able to become rich and famous. Now she has reached the position of department head, but her way of speaking and behaving still cannot hide her humble past. More importantly, Mrs. Nhan's cruel, indifferent, and cold treatment of her younger brother and his wife made outsiders shudder, "Who can be so heartless and heartless in the face of such deep pleas and pleas!" Who could respond with such a patronizing, arrogant, and ridiculous tone after such tearful words? [16; p. 92]. Her sister's death was not enough to touch her soul. The love between blood and flesh was cruelly and ruthlessly rejected. Meanwhile, the sky seemed to still know how to cry, pouring down rain, sobbing and whining. The rain echoed the dead in their sorrow.

The degradation of humanity, the decline of morality and conscience are also shown by the author in the short storySuoi Mo. Nhan is an ugly woman in both appearance and character. She comes from a rural background but is very demanding. Her husband is very kind to her.

pampering, loving. But it is true that "the husband catches shrimp to feed the stork. The stork eats the big stork, the stork climbs the tree". She repaid that favor by turning around to peck, despise, and look down on him as a country bumpkin. Then she had an affair, leaving her husband sick and about to die. That was also San ( Nhien, a dancer ). She was tricked by nature with an innately inadequate, ugly, and short body. She was jealous of those who were better than her. She climbed up the green belt to the rim of a pan and chased the foolish women and girls to the regular room to meet Mr. Diec. She was cruel, pouted at Nhien, gritted her teeth and declared: "Don't tease me, you will be ruined one day". It turns out, badness and evil can arise in each person unconsciously from essential needs. Ma Van Khang himself once explained it like this: “Like cowardice, kindness, love, life's pain, anger, jealousy, deep-rooted selfishness, the inability to love others other than oneself, all have their original seeds, are the roots of karma in the dark, as persistent as life, because they ensure the safe life of each individual human being” [26; p. 276]. Chien and Su ( Teacher Khien ) were originally boatmen and porridge sellers, but now both brothers have climbed the ladder of high social status. One is the chairman, the other is the head of the education department. New bottles but old wine. Those people with ugly, poor appearances, no matter how flashy they are, still reveal their true nature of being mean, deceitful, jealous, envious, arrogant, quarrelsome, aggressive, and looking for ways to destroy and harm others. Likewise, Chien and teacher Ngoc Kim ( The school drummer ) are both petty and mean people. When they see teacher Huan is better than them and shows disobedience, they are filled with jealousy and find every way to harm and destroy him, causing teacher Huan to go from being passionate about the podium and devoted to his students to becoming a bad person, a school drummer, and finally finding a tragic death: "He hanged himself on a banyan branch next to the well of the temple worshiping the lewd and sacred saint" [20; page 134]. The bad and the evil appear everywhere in the pages of Ma Van Khang's stories. That is Kien ( Choosing a Husband ),

The name of a swindler, a smuggler, a pimp, a monster of deception and sex, ruined the life of a girl who came from a well-behaved family. There was also Nhon, who didn't work but wanted to eat, depended on prostitutes to enjoy leisure. His nature was deeply rooted in his personality, a young man who accepted his fate of living as a parasite on prostitutes, spoke rudely, and behaved uncivilized towards his mother who worked hard to support the family...

However, there are bad things that are not necessarily evil, on the contrary, there are evil things that are not considered bad if we look at the problem comprehensively. In some short stories such as Quan Chau's Bodyguard; Co Vinh, the Stranger... Ma Van Khang focused on expressing evil as a primitive, ignorant instinct of humans. Sung Su ( Co Vinh, the Stranger) lives purely by the brutal instinct of the mountains and forests. All his actions are instinctive without any intervention of reason. Co Vinh simply believes that Sung Su is an experience of the unchangeable instinct that no doctrine can change of the Mong people. He does not realize the danger hidden behind that primitive instinct. In the end, the one who harmed the lord was his close friend Juda. The jealous bodyguard, following his inherent immortal instinct, killed Co Vinh just because he touched his "child". Instinctively evil must also be mentioned Khun ( Quan Chau's bodyguard) . Khun is the representative of the most primitive and ignorant instincts of the mountains and forests. Instincts control even Khun's appearance, making people wonder every time they look at him whether it is a demon that has appeared in Khun or Khun himself is a super-level demon. He is violent, cruel, ignorant, and unaware of his actions. When asked why he likes to kill people and is loyal to old Quan Chau, he vaguely remembers that he was fed an eleven-course feast when he was hungry. When he was a child, Khun was cruel. But when he fell into Quan Chau's hands, that cruel instinct was multiplied. Khun "is a return to his ancestors, a hybrid, the brutal nature of jungle life, the wildness

"The beginning of the world" [26; p. 34). People like Khun and Sung Su are both pitiful and angry. Pity for the primitive ignorance and anger for the brutality and barbarism. Ma Van Khang expressed his sorrow and pain at the fact that evil seems to be ingrained in the flesh and blood of these people who live largely on natural emotions.

1.2.1.3. The sublime and the mundane.

Looking for inspiration in everyday life, connecting with ordinary people, Ma Van Khang not only discovers the beauty, the good or the bad, the evil in their behavioral culture but also sees the small, trivial, thorny, and ordinary things that happen every day in the small, private space of the family. Here is the clash between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law ( Pelican in the sea, Everyday miracle) , there is the conflict between sister-in-law and brother-in-law ( Heo may gio long) , there are the cracks that are difficult to mend between sisters ( Sisters) .... The gilded days of Doan's family as well as Thao's ( Heo may gio long ) have passed along with the image of the gusty breeze and the late autumn sky filled with light reflecting the joy of the harvest. This year's gusty breeze season, as scheduled, Thao carried her hand-carried country goods to the city to visit her younger brother's family. After two years of not seeing each other, what appeared before Doan now was no longer the beautiful, radiant older sister of the past, but a haggard, tired, and restless old woman, showing signs of a life of excessive hard work and constant torment and torment. Doan's wife, a frugal and calculating person, was impatient with the visit that affected the family's finances. The shell of courtesy in communication gradually peeled off. Every day, she treated her sister-in-law more and more outrageously, not kicking the bucket, poking fun at her from near and far, but also being extremely sullen. She was cruel, harsh, heartless, and cruel to the point that her sister-in-law had to swallow her tears and leave. It turned out that life still had a reality of being related to each other.

isolated, not wanting to have a relationship with each other. In Daily Miracles, the conflict occurs between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Mrs. Dong, like all other Vietnamese mothers, is full of love for her children and grandchildren and altruism. In her opinion, children come first, grandchildren come second, strangers come sixth. Picking up shelter from the rain, shading from the sun, she takes care of everything. But she still does not win the heart of her daughter-in-law named Dao. Dao's body, when exhausted, is like a rickety cage that cannot contain her sadness and anger. Confusion is always present in Dao. Self-pity, comparison, jealousy, kicking the bucket, taking the blame on the wrong person... all fall on the head of Dao's mother-in-law and poor husband. Daily life no longer has miracles. The small family space becomes suffocating. It is true that the daughter-in-law catches lice for her mother-in-law like seeing a pelican in the sea ( Pelican in the sea ). In the short story Pelican in the Sea, there seems to be a mental state between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Fierce clashes turn the family space into a battlefield, a desert, a hell, a cemetery. Is it possible that love can only be preserved and nurtured in a poor environment? Old age breeds bad habits, the land breeds grass. Accumulated conflicts start from small, trivial, and ordinary things. On the contrary, sisters are like young areca nuts, sisters, ginseng. Yet that natural alliance was broken just because of a homeless, homeless, and profiteering pimp who pretended to be a chivalrous man ( Sisters ). Although they are sisters, Ai is warm, plump, and passionate. Thuong is in her thirties, has a cold beauty, and is difficult to approach. The two sisters come to Hoan, a cruel, promiscuous man. Conflicts arise when Ai discovers that her sister has secretly had a relationship with her lover. Ai packed her bags and left, ending that natural alliance that seemed like it could never short-circuit.

Besides the small, trivial, thorny, and ordinary things, Ma Van Khang also discovered the warmth, simplicity, and nobility of human beings from the perspective of applied culture.

treatment. Before the eternal departure of her husband, the wife in Giai ngue has reconsidered, more tolerant of aunt Thuong - the woman who accidentally got lost in the life of the deceased and destroyed their family happiness. From confrontation, now there is dialogue, from swearing to cut and dissect the corrupt woman, now she has overcome the curse. Perhaps all reasoning becomes meaningless and miserable in front of love. "The situation suddenly pulled two women into the same fate. Both felt so small, miserable, before the void of loss" [18; p. 250]. The deceased's wife sent her child to go with aunt Thuong to her hometown to see how things were, considering inviting her to live with the family to relieve her sadness. That reasonable and reasonable behavior makes people feel warm-hearted, and also more fair and just towards aunt Thuong. Or in Heo may gio long , in contrast to the mother who always criticizes and is cruel to her aunt, Thuy always comforts and cares. Thuy plays the role of balance, leveling. Not a single complaint, not a single careless gesture, diligent and full of responsibility. Thuy fully plays the role of nurse, caregiver, devoted niece to her aunt. In the face of all her mother's criticism, she only reads a very innocent, confident and unarguable rebuttal: where is it? It is the innocence and sincere feelings of people at the source of personality that partly warms the lonely, suffering soul of her aunt. Rising above the mundane habits of life, the winning and losing, the misunderstanding, the gossip, some characters in Ma Van Khang's short stories know how to live beautifully and are truly noble in their behavior. They are the village barber, the female portrait painter, the person who makes parallel sentences in a small province, the locksmith... ordinary people in everyday life. Mr. Sung ( the village barber) once made many contributions to the revolution, but in the end he only returned to barbering - the profession of beautifying a corner of humanity. He was a good son, an unknown person. But deep inside him was a noble personality, the nobility in the behavior of a politician.

gentleman. In the face of a young man who came to get his hair cut, who actually wanted to learn about his life, he calmly responded: “A person must be neat and tidy, from the hair, face, clothes to the inner soul. Private sorrows must be endured to live as a human being. We should not confront the ugly, the bad, the risky. We fight against the dirty things with integrity, dignity, and kindness” [27; p. 231]. Or like Hue in “ The Female Portrait Painter ”. She did not like Peter’s attitude when this guy came to hire her to paint his portrait and then talked about killing the owner’s dog when it came out with the owner to welcome him. Her silence and coldness in the face of Peter’s overconfidence, arrogance and loud voice was the charge for a dialogue-like explosion and cultural debate at the end of the work: “You know but you are not enlightened. He bragged that his mother advised him to apologize to his kite when praising dog meat. That is to show respect for the kite. As for us Vietnamese, when we have to slaughter a dog or a chicken, we say: "Hey chicken, hey dog, I will reincarnate you. In your next life, be a human, not a chicken or a dog anymore" [27; p. 22].

In short, inspired by everyday life, Ma Van Khang discovered human values from the perspective of behavioral culture. Humans have both good and bad, kind and evil, noble and ordinary. But the main tone in each page of his writing is still the praise of beauty, goodness, and nobility. Life is imbued with floral fragrance thanks to those values.

1.2.2. Human from the perspective of sexual culture.

Many of Ma Van Khang’s short stories deal with the issue of human sexuality. This is a courageous act of the writer himself. Because for a long time, this topic has been considered out of coverage, a “dead land” of literature. Ma Van Khang not only dares to mention it, but also mentions it systematically, with a serious satirical inspiration before the beauty of life that transforms the soul.

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